The availability of fertile land.

Vertical farming / hydroponics will solve that.

See the neo-feudalism comment below. Land and even vertical farming will be controlled by nobility / corporates in the neo-feudalism era.

so what’s your solution then? you realize corporations are just run by people? but yes they become cold, heartless soul sucking places. yes.

make your own company and do something about it then. or STFU.

Not the GP, but I'd rather reform our government to not be exclusively for money grubbing companies and billionaires who put profits over people.

i absolutely hear you on that. it just seems too hard to do that.

my solution is to make companies that are cool, fun to work at, push good values and make some money.

then use that money to push for appropriate political moves like you are saying.

how would you propose to reform the government? through voting? good effing luck. it will take $$$.

additionally, i get really annoyed with all the complaining that is done about politics. did you vote? neat, that’s the system we have. want to do something about it? make some money. that’s the system we have.

these people complaining about things instead of doing something will die complaining.

coming from a liberal that is more in the center and annoyed with my overally liberal parents.

Sometimes there just isn’t a solution or it’s not the right time. That’s what bitching is good for. Imagine being the world’s most dedicated republican in 1750s France. You could analyze the state of the world and everything required to fix it but no matter what you do there’s still decades of feudalism left and feudalism fucking sucks. That’s where we are today and these bandaid solutions like making “better” companies are like asking the King to be nicer. It changes nothing fundamentally..

Maybe your lord is a great guy and he does everything right but tomorrow his son comes into power and he could whip you. That’s what a good company is like. My new manager is an asshole who ruined my great job.

that sucks. i just quit my job cuz i was pissed about a lot.

but we can move to new feudal leaders or literally become a feudal leader ourself.

America baby!

Is it easy? nope. neither was getting a tech job or rising and surviving in it. but some of us do and some of us don’t.

anyone interested in some cold blooded american history from the mid-1800s should check out American Primeval on netflix. i really enjoyed it. it is a bit graphic.

> we can move to new feudal leaders

Working on it

I love history. It’s a great cope to see how people can live fulfilling lives under completely different conditions from the standard 2025 life path. Maybe I will check it out :)

totally agree!

Ah, yes, I will take my $3000 of savings and start a company that can compete with triple-digit billionaire venture capital firms for prime farmland....

you could. that’s the beauty of America.

Or you could raise the capital by pitching investors that have money because you actually have a good idea.

or you don’t have a good idea. you don’t have any money. and you want to complain.

what are you asking for? that your parents were more rich? that everyone has the exact same amount of money?

what are you striving for in this comment? are you pointing out that life is unfair? i do agree with that.

First, and most obviously, I'm pointing out that any individual without massive wealth attempting to tackle such a thing on their own is inevitably doomed to fail.

But more importantly, I'm pointing out that suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems is not only inevitably doomed to fail, but is promulgating the wrongheaded thinking that has created and sustained the crisis that brought us to this point.

"I don't want all the land to be held by neofeudal corporations that exercise control over every aspect of our lives" cannot be solved by "so become a neofeudal overlord yourself!" Not only is it effectively impossible to achieve, at the very best it only solves the problem for you.

I don't want to just have a better life for myself. I want a better life for everyone.

i’d say likely to fail, not doomed.

if you want to have a better life for everyone then what is your solution? you do not provide one.

my solution is if enough people with the right thinking also become neofeudal overlords then we can exercise the change you’re talking about.

do you think some day everything is just going to magically snap into place and everyone will just be fair?

it has been fought for and died over for thousands of years to get where we are. and we are lucky that much less of us have to die in order to stand up for what we believe in.

now we can just make money and use that to effect change. pretty cool evolution of civilization if you ask me.

in addition, what’s wrong with solving the problem for me first? then taking care of others? that’s exactly the right approach.

others can then follow the same approach. now we have a lot of feudal overlords.

diversified micro feudalism is the term that this conversation has spurred. i like it!

The solution is to keep fighting, not give up and decide that we can only ever have corruption and despotism, with the only choice being whether we are the oppressed or the oppressors.

A better world is possible, whether you believe in it or not.

i agree with everything you say. i just think the first step is what i’m laying out.

gotta show them we’re not afraid to play their game and win it as well.

we should be able to play any game, any time. But based on that direct the game to be of higher moral ground.

editing this comment as apparently we’ve reached our thread comment limit.

yes, bargaining from a position of power. that would allow to direct it to a more suitable place. banding together with individuals of power to produce combined power. you say it’s impossible and then say exactly how we’re going to do it. :)

i hope you know this has been a very enjoyable conversation for me.

I don't see how "become the oppressors" can possibly be read as having the "moral high ground."

At best it's "bargaining from a position of strength."

But, again, I apparently need to emphasize that what you suggest is, for any given individual, effectively impossible. The only way to achieve it would be to band together in such numbers that we could, instead, work to influence politics toward the ultimate goal of equality with much more success.

Doesn't work well for potatoes (and other carbohydrate heavy crops) as far as I'm aware.

Capital, and its inequal distribution.

The fact that those robots don't exist :-)

Those robots want to be all your tools, with subscription and expensive maintenance that you can no longer do it yourself. And with the obvious kill switch. From tractors to other things

I think this is the part that classic sci-fi didn't get right. It assumed that we would own the robots instead of them being owned by corporations that would rent them out.

Having a robot that I don't control that's stronger than me and smarter than me in my house does not sound at all comforting.

the complexity and expense and necessity for expertise of today's farming machines aren't what the OP is talking about, which sounds more like something from Asimov's Caves of Steel

Yes actually robotics is still in its infancy, it needs machine learning advances to become anything like the generalized problem solving worker that farms need, especially small family farms.

Source: I have worked on both robots and small farms.

Agreed. But I expect huge progress in the next years/decades. It feels like a lot of things are finally coming together. The same happened in the 90s with the internet or the 2000s with cell phones. People are doing research in a lot of different areas and you see some not so great products that implement them. But then you have a point where all components come together in one really compelling product.

But why would individuals own farms instead of big agriculture just using the robots to make food production even cheaper and more efficient? Of course some people will, but most people will live in urban areas and shop at grocery stores. That's been the trend since farming started being automated.

Because there's a very strong strain of (particularly American) thought that the Ideal Life is living off the land in a single-family house, far away from any cities and probably from most other people.

And even the people who recognize that this ideal is utterly impractical can still be strongly influenced by it, such that when a set of technological advances promises the prospect of actually being able to realize it, they jump toward it with stars in their eyes.

Unfortunately, it's not just impractical because of the lack of technology to support it (other obvious problems include the degree to which humans need social interaction to be healthy, the limited amount of land available, the number of things taken for granted in modern life that cannot be either grown or crafted alone, even with robotic help...). It's a fantasy, and always has been.